The Little Smalltalk system was the first Smalltalk interpreter produced outside of Xerox PARC. Although it lacked many of the features of the original Smalltalk-80 system, it helped popularize the ideas of object-oriented programming, virtual machines, and bytecode interpreters. Timothy Budd later rewrote Little Smalltalk in Java, and distributes it as the SmallWorld system.

The original releases are under a variety of licenses. They are now maintained by Danny Reinhold via the Little Smalltalk project. Recently work on a new major version has begun. This differs from earlier releases by providing support for graphical applications, a foreign function interface, and numerous integrated tools.